Dissident Writer Calls for the Breakup of the Chinese ‘Empire’

BEIJING — Liao Yiwu, the self-exiled writer, delivered a devastating critique of the Communist Party’s China on Sunday as he accepted the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, one of the country’s most prestigious awards for writers.

So profound were the historical crimes of the current Chinese state that there was only one solution, said Mr. Liao: “This empire must break apart.” He repeated the message six times. (The speech can be viewed here on Youtube, in German.)

He was speaking in Frankfurt’s St. Paul’s Church, the Paulskirche, the site of Germany’s first democratic Parliament in 1848. It has seen much, including the flowering and destruction of democracy, war and bombing – but probably nothing exactly like this.

Mr. Liao, who last year fled China for Germany to escape years of persecution, began his speech by talking about Lu Peng, a third-grader shot dead during the army crackdown on democracy demonstrations in Beijing in June, 1989, according to the Tiananmen Mothers, a support group for the bereaved.

“Today I’d like however to announce another death, the death of the Chinese Empire. A country that massacres little children must break up. That corresponds to Chinese tradition,” he said.

That wasn’t all.

In its report about the speech, German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle, said Mr. Liao “reproached the West for making a common cause with China under the cloak of free trade. In his speech, given in Chinese, he said it would be a mistake to believe that China’s economic upswing would bring reforms.”

“The value system of the Chinese state has long ago collapsed, and is only being held together by the elite’s lust for power,” Deutsche Welle reported.

It was an extraordinary, no-holds-barred performance that ended with a singing recitation of his poem about a mother’s lament for her dead child, with Mr. Liao accompanying himself on two sound bowls, traditional instruments that emitted an eerie ringing tone punctuated by single notes.

In China, the reaction to Mr. Liao was sparse but extreme. In a commentary entitled “Exiled dissidents should leave their hatred behind,” the Global Times, a newspaper under the party’s People’s Daily, called his speech “hysterical” (the English version of the commentary can be read here.)

“It’s surprising that Germany picks such a bigoted person as the award winner. Shouldn’t those attending the ceremony, including the German president Joachim Gauck, blush for Liao’s hysterical speech? Liao’s performance will make the Chinese look down upon Germany’s wisdom and breadth of thought in awarding the prize to Liao,” it read.

“Germans probably think this award could exert some influence on China. But Chinese are used to Westerners using dissidents. Compared with the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo in 2010, the latest book award will barely draw any attention,” it concluded.

Yet the event, which Chinese diplomats in Germany refused to attend, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (here in German) was packed with hundreds of Germany’s most prominent politicians and writers including its president, Joachim Gauck, himself a former dissident in East Germany, and broadcast live on ARD, a state television channel.

In her laudatory speech, Felicitas von Lovenberg, the literary editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, described Mr. Liao’s literary talents – he has been translated widely into German – as “the poetry of veracity.”

Mr. Liao, jailed in 1989 for four years for writing a poem, has written about jail and about the underbelly of Chinese society.

To critics who have said Mr. Liao is not so much a writer as a dissident, he had an answer in his speech. He said another writer called Liu Shahe, also declared an enemy of the state and jailed in 1957, told him: “The wounds inflicted by such a blow of fate never heal. We aren’t poets any more now, we have become witnesses of history.”